Human rights must get religion

Many
human rights activists are secular and view religion as a problem, rather than as
an ally. Although religion does often pose serious challenges, it also offers
the human rights movement hope for renewal, along with greater legitimacy and
impact. A contribution to the openGlobalRights debate,Religion and Human Rights. Français, Español,العربية

Human rights and
religion need each other. Although the universality of human rights may require
a secular presentation, the human rights movement’s real power comes from its
inherent religious dimensions. When today’s human rights activists recognize
and connect with those dimensions, they gain strength, new alliances, and the
greater global legitimacy they so urgently need.

As preliminary
evidence, remember that so many of the world’s struggles for freedom and
dignity were led by people of deep faith, including El Salvador’s Oscar Romero,
India’s Mahatma Gandhi, Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, the United States’ (US) Martin
Luther King, and Burma/Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi.

A woman carries a sign with photos on the march to honor Martin Luther King Jr (San Francisco, 2013). Steve Rhodes/Demotix All Rights Reserved.

These and other believers
have been disproportionately active in movements for rights and social justice.
They do so because their faith often gives them the moral inspiration, the
popular legitimacy, and the internal strength to endure great suffering. As a
result, faith-based action has been, and still is, one of the most important
forces undermining repressive political systems everywhere.

Religions and
rights often converge because of a shared belief in what the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights calls “the inherent dignity” of “all members of the
human family.” Like the Declaration, most religions preach a love of all human
beings, and the need for action when human dignity is violated.

Human rights and
religions also share the claim that this dignity, along with the rights required
to protect it, is not a human or government invention, but is rather present at
birth in each and every one of us.

Given these
affinities, it is both surprising and tragic that relations between religion
and human rights - especially of late – are so often problematic.

From Northern
Ireland to the Vatican, Syria, and Central African Republic, religious figures
and interpretations are often boldface contributors to abuse. Defenders of
unjust structures and behaviors often use religion to suppress courageous voices
for change, create divisions, justify oppression, and violate rights of
vulnerable people.

Indeed, some of the
most spectacular expressions of religious fervor come from groups that promote
violence, intolerance, misogyny and homophobia. In the US, for example, religious
activism is often associated with attacks on the rights of women and LGBTQ
people, scientific inquiry, and criticisms of unregulated capitalism.

As a result, the
media and many scholars often ignore religions’ progressive expressions,
viewing faith as an expression of superstition, fanaticism, or conservatism.

Many human rights
advocates share this view, and stress the secular nature of human rights work.
Among other things, they note that the Universal Declaration contains no
reference to God or faith. The Declaration’s drafters did this intentionally,
so as to enable the document’s acceptance by people of any, and no, religion.

As a result, many
human rights proponents view secularity as key to the Declaration’s effectiveness.
As the eminent legal scholar Louis Henkin put it, “The
human rights ideology is a fully secular and rational ideology whose very
promise of success as a universal ideology depends on its secularity and
rationality.”

Human rights
professionals, many of whom are lawyers in international or domestic NGOs,
typically speak to other professionals in NGOs, government, and
inter-governmental organizations.

Although the website
of Human Rights Watch and other likeminded groups provides abundant examples of
moral outrage, these are rarely linked to any attempt at social mobilization,
including among faith communities. The tacit message is that pro-human rights action
is best left to secular professionals, media watchdogs, and liberal governments
or intergovernmental organizations.

The increasingly
sharp divide between human rights professionals and religion comes at serious
cost. By portraying human rights as something
secular, legalistic, and owned by professionals, practitioners distance it from
the multitudes whose action is needed to move governments.

To improve human
rights, mass publics must get involved, including those whose rights are most
violated. And yet, even victims of the worst abuses are unlikely to engage with
a concept and with organizations that appear unrelated, or even hostile, to the
religions that give them comfort, strength, meaning, and practical assistance.

Human rights groups
are aware of the power of religion, but their attempts to connect with that
power are remarkably limited. Consider Amnesty International USA, a civil
society group built around the principle of mobilizing the public for action.
Although it has many public outreach programs, all are aimed at students, professionals,
lawyers, educators, and youth. Remarkably, not a single one is aimed at
religious leaders or communities.

This lack of
engagement with US religion is due not just to the distance between human
rights and religious leaders, but also to human rights leaders’ distance from
the inherent religious dimensions of their own ideas.

These religious
dimensions of human rights do not depend on particular religious beliefs or
views on the nature and existence of a God.
As legal scholar Ronald Dworkin notes, religion
is any worldview that “holds that inherent, objective value permeates
everything, that the universe and its creatures are awe-inspiring, that human
life has purpose and the universe order.”

Without saying why,
the Universal Declaration asserts that every human being is born with the
“objective value” of dignity and rights, and that these transcend the
individual. This inherent dignity connects us with every other human being, and
thus to the order and purpose of our world. Implicitly, this also connects human
rights with virtually every religious tradition, including both those that
believe in - and do not believe in – a theistic God.

More importantly,
the people who fight for human rights often experience this inherent sense
of connection. This personal, individual, and powerful experience gives human rights
their full meaning and social power. This experience, felt by secular and
religious activists alike, explains the courage of a student standing in front
of a Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square, of a woman standing alone with the placard,
“give women their rights” in a Saudi square, and of all those who courageously
risked their lives for rights from El Salvador to South Africa and Tibet.

It is important
--vitally important--to translate the internal experience of rights into laws.
If this legal translation denies this transcendent experience, however, those
laws’ force and legitimacy is greatly diminished.

It is this loss,
easier to see than to measure, that has contributed to the recent talk by
British academic Stephen Hopgood of the “endtimes
of human rights.”

This disconnect is
also a great loss to religion. The power of faiths, which globally show no
signs of diminishing, comes from the symbols, rituals, and texts that capture
the transcendent and sacred reality people experience. We need human rights to
protect the expression, and guard against the misuse, of this power.

As scholar Abdullahi An-Naim
explains, human rights are also necessary to safeguard the rights of
believers to challenge religious orthodoxy and attempts to identify religion
with rights violators. By passing laws based on human rights, the state helps
different religious communities, and members of the same community who have
different interpretations, live together in shared political space. And by
struggling to align their values with human rights standards, religions grow in
ways essential to their vitality.

To get a sense of
how religion and human rights have worked together, consider the US civil
rights movement. As
historians document, many
of the people who fought for civil and constitutional rights in America thought
of their movement as a religious event. The same is true today for the
remarkable Moral Mondays
Movement that mobilizes thousands every week to risk arrest and fight
voter suppression, economic injustice and other violations in North Carolina.

In 2007, the transformative
power of religion was on view in Burma/Myanmar, when thousands of Buddhist monks
joined protests and withdrew spiritual services from military personnel. In
2010/11, religiously motivated activists beyond the Mulsim Brotherhood played
key roles in the Arab Awakening. As Yale professor Seyla Benhabib notes, “Just
as followers of Martin Luther King were educated in the black churches in the
American South… so the crowds in Tunis, Egypt and elsewhere draw upon Islamic
traditions of Shahada -- the act of being a martyr and witness of God at the
same time.”

Sadly, the US,
Myanmar and Middle Eastern countries also show how religious power, when
untethered to human rights commitments, can turn demonic. Whether it is the American
religious right that demonizes LGBT and other people, the Buddhist groups in
Burma who kill Muslims, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that used state
power to attack democracy, the harm done by organizations in the name of
religion is often horrific.

Combatting religious-based
oppression is complex and urgent. Ultra-exclusivist religious groups often
welcome secular criticism, portraying it as an attack on faith itself. As a
result, some of the most effective work against religious-based oppression comes
from human rights-minded co-religionists such as the Network of Engaged Buddhists,
the Jewish T’ruah, the
Christian Faith
in Public Life, the Muslim Musawa, and many others.

Secular rights groups
must support, protect and learn from these faith-based allies. Most
importantly, secular rights workers must rediscover the faith and values they
share with religions, and work together in movements that draw on the best of
human rights and religions.

By reuniting faith
and human rights worldwide, we can replace the approaching human rights
“endtimes” with growth, renewal, and resurgence.

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